Because you don’t have enough drinking games on your list, here’s one you can have for free:
On the day of the NBA MVP vote, you take one pop for each vote of the 130 Stephen Curry doesn’t get, and we’re prepared to tell you it will be more than one and maybe even more than alcohol poisoning.
In fact, we’ll make it easy on your livers and point out that over the past decade, an average of 3.7 people got votes each year, and non-winners got 251 of the 1232 possible first-place votes.
Proof: Last year, in one of the closest votes, Curry got 100 of the 130 (James Harden 25, LeBron James five). The year before that, Kevin Durant got 119, James six. In 2013, James got all but one vote for Carmelo Anthony, and the year before that, James (85), Durant (24), Chris Paul (6), Kobe Bryant (4) and Tony Parker (2).
In other words, you can cite all the evidence you want for Curry, but you can still bank on at least Kawhi Leonard, Russell Westbrook, James and maybe even a sympathy vote for Kobe Bryant. So stay hydrated until the end of May. Your sponsor will thank you.
# # #
In other news, the fact that so many members of the ’96 Bulls came out and said kind things about Golden State’s run at 73 didn’t seem to resonate as much as the cranky oldsters who were sure the Warriors couldn’t hang with the Cincinnati Royals or San Diego Rockets.
Though I still haven’t heard Dickey Simpkins weigh in.
UPDATE: Yes I have (http://bit.ly/23ztqF4).
# # #
Sean Payton discovered what happens when the right to bear arms puts a hole in one of his, and we can expect the usual blowback over the next 24 to 48.
After former Saint Will Smith was shot and killed the other night in New Orleans, which is rapidly becoming the new murder capital of the world, Payton, who describes himself as “not an extreme liberal . . . I find myself leaning to the right on some issues,” found himself straying from the hive mind on guns.
“Two hundred years from now, they’re going to look back and say, ‘What was that madness about?’” he said. “The idea that we need (guns) to fend off intruders . . . people are more apt to draw them (in other situations). That’s some silly stuff we’re hanging onto.”
If the Saints had only gone 11-5 and made a deep run on the playoffs, he might have actually changed some minds.
# # #
Johnny Manziel has not hit bottom yet. I mean, just in case you didn’t know what to make about him rooming with suspended wide receiver Josh Gordon rather than Super Bowl MVP Von Miller, with whom he claimed to be living.
How much further then has he to go? Ask the earth’s crust.
# # #
There won’t be any more Harbaugh satellite camps because of the NCAA, but that doesn’t mean that his successor/success at Stanford, David Shaw, won’t have this quote thrown at him a few hundred times between now and the day he forgets that he’s happy and goes to the NFL:
“I'm great with whatever college football says, because it doesn't affect us,” Shaw said after Stanford’s spring game. “It doesn't make sense for us to go hold a camp some place where there might be one person in the entire state that's eligible to get into Stanford.”
An entire state? One? If this is true (which it isn’t), Shaw’s wasting his talents where he is and ought to be angling to become Secretary of Education.
# # #
Maria Sharapova, spokesperson for meldonium, can now claim company, whether she wants to or not. Nearly the entire Russian under-18 hockey team, which was supposed to be in Grand Forks, N.D., for next week’s U18 World Championships, tested positive for meldonium, and after firing coach Vitaly Prokhorov, the team is being replaced with the U-17 team instead, which presumably does not glow like a night light in a coal mine.
# # #
Sad news for any of you wealthy types who wanted to give your kid a bowl game for his or her birthday: The NCAA has declared a three-year moratorium on the glorification of advertisers by making sub-mediocre football teams dance one more time for no interested parties.
Too bad, too, because the NCAA was thisclose to giving America the dream it has long craved – a bowl team with only four wins, and everyone getting a participant’s badge (and the odd concussion) as long as the adults get that last bucket of milk from the withering cow.
In the meantime, these were the 5-7 teams who were shunned under the old system: Buffalo, East Carolina, Florida International, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Old Dominion, Rice, South Alabama, Texas and UTEP. Coincidentally (I’m sure), one of the places that wanted a bowl game that now has to wait was . . . you guessed it first time, it’s Austin, Texas.
In other words, wait a year. We’ll clear up that 5-7 backlog right quick and give you what you’ve always craved – the Vanderbilt Spring Game, only in December.
# # #
And finally, the tally is complete, and Kobe Bryant’s last year was better for NBA ticket sales than Curry’s best year. Both players sold out 38 of the 41 road games they played (and all the home games, obviously), but Bryant drew 10,892 fans above the capacities for the 29 road arenas in which he played, while Curry limped in at plus-7,135. In short, more people stood for Kobe's long goodbye than Curry's long threes.
Interestingly (well, not really, but you’re almost at the end here), Curry failed to sell out either of his games in Denver or the first of his two in Minneapolis, while Bryant didn’t fill the house once in Denver and the only games he played in Minnesota and Detroit.
I guess that makes them ingrates, although based on ticket price spikes (Golden State’s home final against Memphis has a $1,600 ticket price on the open gougers market), it might also make them savvy consumers.
